Regenerative medicine technology tBiomedical engineering professors Devina Purmessur and Natalia Higuita-Castro are leading an interdisciplinary team at The Ohio State University to address an underlying cause of the pain, intervertebral disc (IVD) degeneration. They recently earned a one-year, $368,000 National Institutes of Health (NIH) R61 award to investigate novel minimally invasive and non-addictive therapies for low back pain.
According to Purmessur, director of the Spinal Therapeutics Lab and faculty member of the Spine Research Institute, most current surgical and non-surgical treatments focus on alleviating the pain. “The problem with focusing on just the pain, is that it doesn’t fix the disease,” she explained. “You’re just treating the symptoms.”
Therefore, the optimal therapy would target both structural restoration and pain reduction. For some time, Purmessur has questioned if diseased and deteriorating IVD cells could be coaxed to revert their phenotype back to original function and health. An opportunity to explore further came last year when she learned about another Ohio State biomedical engineering team’s breakthrough, tissue nanotransfection (TNT), that can convert skin cells into blood vessels and nerve cells.
“It started with a conversation with Natalia and Daniel (Gallego-Perez) about their work,” she said. “If they can take a cell and differentiate it into a completely different cell type, can we take a diseased cell and reverse it back to its healthy state through tissue engineering?”
Higuita-Castro believes they can. Their proposal employs a multi-disciplinary approach to determine the effects of non-viral delivery of developmental proteins, specifically transcrip